As kids, we all spent much of our time engaging in appeasing our thirst for knowledge, letting our imaginations run wild and most importantly, figuring out what we liked and what we were good at. For Tracy, discovering his knack for transferring what he saw in his head onto paper came into play before he even locked down all the nuances of using words,
“It’s a funny story my mom always tells that I learned how to draw before I learned how to write. I remember she always tells me the story and I remember the picture still, that she gave me a crayon and piece of paper and she wanted me to write something. But instead, I ended up drawing a cowboy on a horse, but of course the drawing was horrible where the cowboy’s feet were touching the ground and yet he was sitting on top of the horse so it was really weird where the cowboy was just as tall as the horse. She would always tell me that I would always wanna draw things more than actually write. I feel as if I learned how to draw before I learned how to write.”
After graduating from Cal State Long Beach majoring in Illustration, Tracy has designed everything from t-shirts to skateboard shoes, but found his niche in toy design and now animation, which are the disciplines that currently drive his career and satisfy his love for designing characters. Just as he can trace his passion for drawing back to his days as a young kid, the Lakers also became a part of his life early on and while he’d never want to have it any other way, Tracy never had a choice in the matter,
“When Magic hit that sky hook, I remember watching that game with my family at a pizza joint. I blame my parents for me being so obsessed with the Lakers because they were so obsessed.”
There’s no doubt that being a die-hard fan runs in the family, but Tracy took his fanhood to the highest level last season by biting the bullet and shelling out his funds to personally attend each home game of the epic seven-game Lakers-Celtics Finals series that we all gutted out just seven months ago. It goes without saying that Game 7 holds a very special place in his Laker-loving heart,
“Game Seven is probably the best Laker memory or moment I have right now. For the first three and a half quarters man, I was sweating, I was pissed, I was kicking stuff because they were playing horrible and Kobe was missing shots. My one homie Julian who was there with me, he was calming me down telling me not to worry and that they were gonna win and even my wife kept telling me too before the game to not worry about it, that even if they’re down, they’re going to win. She even told me in the beginning of the season last year that they were gonna win a championship. So I kept thinking about that in the back of my head during the whole game. And the minute they got the lead in the fourth quarter, everyone started going crazy, high fiving everybody, it was such a dramatic change from everyone being so pissed and sad to being so happy. When the game was finally over, that feeling of just being there was amazing. My wallet was hurting after the games, but it was one of those things where I was able to go to a Game 7 at home, where the Lakers won back-to-back championships, against the Celtics, and it was totally worth it.”
It should be pretty evident by now that Tracy is a big-time Laker fan and a talented, devoted artist. Just to set the record straight as well, he’s a citizen of Lakers Nation like the rest of us and you can expect more big things to come from him.
